If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

WASHINGTON — A photo of the Obamas hugging that was released on Election Day 2012 has become the world’s most popular tweet on Twitter. A dressed-up version of Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, packed with charts and graphs, is huge on YouTube. A playful picture of the president cavorting with a 3-year-old in a Spiderman costume is a favorite online.

It’s all courtesy of the Obama image machine, serving up a stream of words, images and videos that invariably cast the president as commanding, compassionate and on the ball. In this world, Obama’s family is always photogenic, first dog Bo is always well-behaved and the vegetables in the South Lawn kitchen garden always seem succulent.

You’ll have to look elsewhere for bloopers, bobbles or contrary points of view.

Capitalizing on the possibilities of the digital age, the Obama White House is generating its own content like no president before, and refining its media strategies in the second term in hopes of telling a more compelling story than in the first.
Read More>http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/...ccess-narrows/
Many of these photographs are suitable for worship and crop nicely for your wallet.

The difference between pigs and people is that when they tell you you're cured it isn't a good thing.

At the same time, it is limiting press access in ways that past administrations wouldn’t have dared, and the president is answering to the public in more controlled settings than his predecessors. It’s raising new questions about what’s lost when the White House tries to make an end run around the media, functioning, in effect, as its own news agency.

Mike McCurry, who served as press secretary to President Bill Clinton, sees an inclination by the Obama White House to “self-publish,” coupled with tactics “I never would have dreamed of in terms of restricting access” for independent news organizations.

“What gets lost are those revealing moments when the president’s held accountable by the representatives of the public who are there in the form of the media,” says McCurry.

Which of the sycophantic Democratic Party publicists masquerading as representatives of the public does he expect to hold this president accountable?

What’s different now, says Mark Jurkowitz of the Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism, is new technology that allows the White House to distribute its own content far more widely and effectively than past presidents could. At the same time, it’s getting harder for cash-strapped news outlets to resist using photos, video and other content supplied by the White House.

No, what's different now is that the press is letting Obama get away with this. Remember how the press used to shout "gotcha" questions at Bush and Reagan, regardless of whether the setting warranted that kind of spectacle? Sam Donaldson made his career on it. Now, the press pliantly allows the Obama administration to present its own narrative without even making a pretense of an attempt at getting answers to any questions that might prove difficult for Obama.

Obama’s communications strategy works well for him, Dezenhall says, but sometimes at the expense of the “rowdy, boisterous scrutiny that the free press is based on.”

I remember the rowdy, boisterous scrutiny of Reagan and both Bushes, but Clinton, not so much, and Obama? Nil. Who do these guys think that they are fooling? This is happening because our pliant media lets it happen. When Obama has been faced with questions that he couldn't answer, like during the presidential debates, the media closed ranks to defend him and deflect criticism. The basic conceit in this article is that somehow, Obama and his handlers have managed to circumvent the media, when the truth is that the media is in lockstep with the administration and its party.